Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a power monitoring system. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a power monitoring system that monitors electric energy for each of loads and to aggregate results of the monitoring to thereby monitor electric energy of the entire system.
Description of the Related Art
Typically, power being consumed in a residence can be monitored using an electric meter. Such an electric meter, however, can measure only the total amount of electric energy consumed in a residence but not the amount of electric energy consumed by each of appliances in the residence. Accordingly, a user cannot know the amount of energy consumed by each of the appliances and thus does not know which one of the appliances is to be managed in order to save energy consumption. It would be cost-inefficient to provide every appliance with an electric meter in order to measure the amount of energy consumed by the appliances.
To this end, non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) has been developed to monitor the amount of energy consumed by every appliances in a residence. The NILM is a technique that predicts the amount of energy consumed by each of loads (appliances) in a building and a driving schedule for generating electric power by way of measuring overall voltage and current supply.
Specifically, the NILM may be carried out by using a sampling device. The sampling device can analyze patterns of how the loads consume energy while monitoring energy consumption. Specifically, the sampling device monitors contains information on energy consumption patterns each matched with one of the loads, and if a particular pattern is monitored, it is determined that an appliance matched with the pattern is consuming electric energy.
Although the amount of energy consumed by each of the loads can be measured by the sampling device, there is another problem in that it is not possible to measure the amount of energy consumption taking into account energy supplied from an external source, e.g., in a residence with a solar power generator or in a residence or a building with an energy management system. Such a common problem of NILM will be described in detail below with reference to FIG. 1.
FIG. 1 shows a typical power monitoring system including a sampling device for NILM.
As shown in FIG. 1, the power monitoring system includes a distribution board 2 that distributes power transmitted from a transmission system 1 to loads (appliances) 3. The distribution board may include a plurality of switches and a circuit breaker.
The power monitoring system includes a sampling device 10 in the distribution board. Specifically, the sampling device 10 may be disposed at a previous stage to the loads 3 and receive power before it is distributed. Accordingly, the sampling device may monitor the total amount of energy supplied to the loads 3 and may measure a pattern of energy consumed by each of the loads 3. Examples of the loads 3 may be home appliances.
As described above, however, the sampling device is usually disposed inside the distribution board, and thus the sampling device cannot monitor the amount of electric energy supplied from an external source.
Employing an additional sampling device for monitoring the amount of electric energy supplied from an external source would be cost-inefficient. Under the circumstances, according to an embodiment of the present disclosure, a power monitoring system can accurately monitor the amount of energy supplied/consumed in the overall system by combining an existing monitoring device and a single sampling device, with no additional sampling device.